What a disgrace to the human race Vladimir “Ras” Putin’s Russia is. A chaotic and corrupt Mafiocracy featuring crooked elections, gangster justice and murderous repression of its minorities.

And now recalling its own bloody purges of its citizens back in its disgraceful Soviet past by failing to oppose or even condemn the mass-murder of Syrians by their Stalin-style president, Bashar al-Assad.

Like its even more despicable fellow foe of freedom, justice and human rights, the ludicrously mis-named “People’s” Republic of China, Russia is against the civilised world’s opposition to killer regimes like Syria’s because it so fears such intervention in its own sordid affairs.

But it can’t get away with its criminality forever. It has already suffered the collapse of its own former empire under the sheer weight of its fraudulence, corruption and incompetence.

And, like the Chinese Communist Party, will eventually be swept away by a tsunami of its own citizens’ rage. Meanwhile, Russia’s ruling regime deserves to be regarded as just as much if not more of an international pariah as those of Syria, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, Malaysia or any other of the world’s criminal gangs posing as governments and not exactly rushin’ to the defence of the hapless Syrian people.